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Bad Job Board Titles

They’re the people who make sure you get paid every week, or biweekly or however often you get paid. They’re the ones who you talk to when you have a complaint about another employee. HR personnel are also, generally, responsible for posting job reqs.

If you go to Dice.com, or Monster, or Career Builder, you’re going to see a whole lot of job postings that, as you scan the titles, start to blur together a bit.

The reason for this is because almost all job postings carry a cliché name based on the fact that generic templates (or more accurately, “loosely specific”) are used and common titles are used. This usually is because the HR person who puts together the job listing is not familiar enough with the minutiae of the specific position as, say, a hiring manager might be.

So you end up with titles like “Web Developer”.

What does it meeeeeeeeeaaaan?

Many of you know that, about three weeks ago, I lost my job to a reorganization at the company I worked for as a WordPress Developer (another loosely specific title). Since that time, I have been talking to a variety of companies that have proactively reached out to me, knowing my reputation and experience in the WordPress world. I have generally avoided the job sites because of the problem described above.

“Web Developer” as a title is misleading, vague and all-encompassingly wrong. Why do you say that, you might ask.

Generally speaking, a web developer job is listed like this:

Acme, Inc. is seeking a driven, highly talented candidate to fill our Web Developer position. In this position, you will demonstrate creativity as you work with others to accommodate our clients needs. Eligible candidates posses intimate knowledge of the following

HTML5

CSS3

jQuery, or similar Javascript framework

SASS or LESS

Grunt

Node

AngularJS

Please forward your portfolio to XYZ@ABC.com.

Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

This is, in fact, a valid “web developer” role.

A valid web developer role may also look like this:

Acme, Inc. is seeking a driven, highly talented candidate to fill our Web Developer position. In this position, you will demonstrate problem solving as you design, build, test and deploy a RESTful API and database cluster that can grow as needed. We prefer the candidate has some knowledge of algorithms and scaling. Candidates should possess intimate knowledge of the following:

NoSQL

MariaDB/MySQL

PHP/Python/Ruby

Vagrant

Agile and/or Scrum development environments

Moderate familiarity with Ubuntu or other Linux environment

Please forward your resume and a link to your Github account to XYZ@ABC.com

Very similar, and yet very different job listings. Yet they can both be referred to a “Web Developer” jobs, even though one is, more accurately, a “Front End Developer” role and another is “Back End Developer”.

By calling a job a “Web Developer” job, you have people who have only futzed around in Dreamweaver and only consider the user experience or interface looking at positions meant for data architects. And you have folks who know how to stand up an EC2 cluster and build and deploy Django applications with high redundancy and caching layers looking at jobs meant for the people who lose sleep at night over typefaces.

Everyone loses.

The candidate loses the opportunity to find the position she is really looking for because it’s buried under a bad title, or she gets so tired of looking for the real gold in the pile of rocks that she gives up.

The employer loses the opportunity because the signal to noise ratio on applications is terrible. Or, people just get tired of applying for mislabeled jobs.

So please, hiring managers, at least write up your “recommended” job req for HR. You know the job better than anyone. You know who you are looking for. Give it a proper name!

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Aaron Brazell

My name is Aaron Brazell and I am the author of the WordPress Bible. I have been building WordPress solutions for over ten years for clients large and small. I have also been a core contributor. I live in Baltimore with my dog, though I (and he) claims Austin as home.